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The aim of this exploratory study was to better understand some of the factors that influenced language learning using asynchronous computer-mediated communication, by analysing interactional behaviour of foreign language learners. The participants were learners of Japanese at an Australian secondary school and English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners at a Japanese high school, who communicated through a bulletin board system (BBS) using Japanese and English, to complete weekly tasks designed to develop understanding of the participants’ cultures. The messages on a BBS were analysed to see if meaningful interactions occurred between the participants, by determining whether the learners actually referred back to previous messages to provide appropriate answers, or whether learners simply wrote a series of monologues without reference to messages written by their interlocutors. The findings show that the threads of messages were often incoherent, and students did not always reply to requests for information posted by their overseas counterparts.

The current study analyses how learners of Japanese interpreted and completed tasks through collaborative interaction in two task-based CALL classes at a secondary school in Australia. Sociocultural approaches of mediation and the zone of proximal development were employed as the analytical tools to identify patterns and roles of collaborative interaction during task interpretation and completion. The paper also critically analyses the suitability of sociocultural approaches as analytical tools for analysing the collaborative interaction which occurred during completion of an open-ended task. The paper concludes with implications for new analytical tools and further research.

This paper reports on the evidence learning found from a flipped, blended, ubiquitous learning Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) course teaching global leadership skills using a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) to Japanese undergraduates through English. The purposes of the current study are to see if (1) there was any evidence of learning found in the students’ oral outputs, and (2) there were any changes in student perceptions about the course and their Target Language (TL) fluency over a 10-week period. The data were collected through two interview sessions conducted in Weeks 4 and 14. A similar set of questions were asked in both interviews to gauge student understanding of the course content, perceptual changes, and oral output skills. Three-semesters worth of interview data were transcribed and sorted into four categories; (1) transfer of words, (2) transfer of phrases, (3) transfer of concepts, and (4) application of concepts. The results indicated that the students’ perceptions of the course shifted from an English as a foreign language course to a leadership course, and they produced more course relevant answers.

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